Once upon a time in Northern Ireland

Published: 18 July 2008(GMT+10)

The BBC recently screened a much-touted three-part documentary on the history of
the land, wildlife and people of Northern Ireland (NI).1 Titled Blueprint, the visually rich programmes
incorporated footage from numerous locations all over the province, including stunning
views from the air and a liberal use of computer special effects. Blueprint
was also backed by a scientific advisory panel including many notable experts2 and fronted by an enthusiastic
presenter (William Crawley) who clearly believed the secular history-tale that he
was bringing before his audiences. It is no wonder, therefore, that many viewers
will have swallowed it all, hook-line-and-sinker.

‘Where did we come from? How did we get here?’

So begins the introduction to Blueprint on the BBC’s website3 and no stone is left unturned
in seeking to assure viewers of the epic journey of the province of NI through deep
time and space. ‘Together we’ll peel back millions of years of history
… ’ and ‘That story has been six hundred million years in
the making. It’s the blueprint of who we are today.’ The
website asserts, ‘Northern Ireland will never look the same again.’
And therein lies the crux of the matter, for it is quite true that those who unquestioningly
accepted this mish-mash of evidence and evolutionary interpretations will ‘see’
NI from a perspective that is entirely alien to biblical history.

Yet, stripped of the secular assumptions of deep time, the same evidence of the
rocks, plants, animals and people shown on Blueprint can be ‘seen’
to be fully compatible with the historical record of Genesis

Yet, stripped of the secular assumptions of deep time, the same evidence of the
rocks, plants, animals and people shown on Blueprint can be ‘seen’
to be fully compatible with the historical record of Genesis—an originally
perfect Creation, the Fall of mankind and the globe-shattering event of Noah’s
Flood. The effects of a flood of that magnitude would have played a large part in
shaping the NI we see today—but this possibility, hardly surprisingly, is
not even mentioned to viewers.

The vast majority of the individual teaching points made in this series have been
dealt with on this website by numerous feature articles and/or in articles published
in Creation
magazine or Journal of
Creation. So, rather than providing detailed critiques again here,
what follows is an overview of some of the major assertions made on Blueprint
together with links to further recommended reading.

The Land

This first instalment confidently asserted that our Earth used to be a roasting
hot furnace, torched by volcanoes—but there’s more: ‘It’s
been parched under a baking hot desert sun. It’s been drowned beneath a balmy,
tropical lagoon—and it’s been cased in a sub-zero block of ice.’
Methinks, ‘Once upon a time … ’!

600 million years ago (mya), Ireland’s foundations existed on two separate
continents, marked today by twisted and folded rocks (a crumple zone) at Clogherhead,
Co. Louth.
Why is this not more obvious to your average inhabitant of NI? The answer given
is that ‘millions of years have covered up the evidence.’ Following
brief lessons on plate tectonics, volcanoes and mountain building, we are told that
the fusing of what were originally two separate parts of Ireland produced the Sperrins,
mountains that stretch between Co. Derry (known as that in Ireland, and as Londonderry in Northern Ireland) and Co. Tyrone.4 These mountains were allegedly part of the Caledonian
mountain range that was supposedly up to 15 times higher than seen today (higher
than the Himalayas) and originally about 3000 km (1800) miles long—stretching
from Norway, through Scotland and NI into eastern Canada. However, it is claimed
that ‘millions of years’ of erosion have reduced them to what we see
today—but the appeal to long ages is nothing more than a belief. Creationist
geologists readily understand that folding, crumpling and erosion of landscapes
occurred as a result of crustal movements during the the Flood. Many mountain building
events (called orogenies) occurred within that single Flood year. Those that occurred
during the ‘Inundatory’ stage (waters rising) were severely eroded,
but those that occurred in the ‘Recessive’ (i.e. late) stage of the
Flood were preserved as mountains on Earth today—see
The mountains rose.

400 mya, there was a red desert in the rain-shadow of the huge Caledonian peaks.
‘The proof that a mighty mountain range once existed here’ is said to
be shown by certain minerals that are found underground and by the evidence of the
red rocks of both Cushendun5
(Co. Antrim) and Red Bay on the north Antrim coast. However, rather than a desert,
the ‘physical characteristics of the Old Red Sandstone point to exceptional
depositional processes from water, quite different from the sorts of processes that
we see happening on the earth today’ and entirely consistent with the biblical
Flood as discussed here.

350 mya, Ireland was a tropical place and the limestone Marble Arch Caves of Co.
Fermanagh are interpreted as evidence of this—stated to have been hollowed
out over millions of years, at about 30°C, as rainwater dissolved the calcite
mineral. The tropical conditions are inferred from the existence of fossils of sponges
and corals as well as those of sea lilies and other marine creatures on the Streedagh
coast, Co. Sligo. Again, the appeal to deep time to form caves and speleothems6 is unwarranted—see
How were limestone caves formed? and
Do stalactites and stalagmites take a long time to form?

By 248 mya, plate movements supposedly had led to the formation of a supercontinent
and desert conditions returned. 600 feet beneath the main road from Carrickfergus
to Larne, miners exploit salt seams that are thought to be evaporite deposits and
said to be of Triassic ‘age’. Plate tectonics is a concept that many
creationist geologists consider to fit extremely well within the Flood paradigm—think
‘continental sprint’ rather than continental drift—see chapter 11 of
the Creation Answers Book and other helpful articles
here. The internal evidence from huge salt deposits around the world
actually presents problems for the uniformitarian idea that they evaporated over
millions of years. Such deposits point to a catastrophic origin—in-depth articles
are available,7,8 for instance
here and
here.9

60 mya, great swathes of the east of NI were, we’re told, the scene of a cataclysmic
event. Stretching of the rocks between the European and North American plates led
to their thinning and rupturing, resulting in massive outpourings of lava that lasted
for three million years. It was during this time that the famous Giant’s Causeway
is supposed to have come into being—but massive lava outpourings mean the
Causeway did not need much time to form. See how
colossal volcanic upheavals during Noah’s Flood easily explain this
NI geologic icon, and about
attempts to censor such information from the public.

Then William Crawley states: ‘As the dust settled, mammals and birds filled
the evolutionary gap left by the dinosaurs.’ In fact, more recent fossil evidence
is forcing evolutionists to accept that mammals and birds were around for tens of
millions of years before dinosaurs became extinct at around 65 million
years ago—even according to their conventional timeframe. For example the
‘earliest’ marsupial mammal was reported in 2003 to be 125 million years
old10 and footprints like
those made by modern birds have been found in rocks dating well over 200 million
years by uniformitarian reckoning.11
The claimed evolutionary sequence doesn’t stack up, questioning the anticipated
evolutionary order in the fossil record.

2 mya, the Ice Age began and led to U-shaped valleys in NI. Creationists accept
that one Ice Age followed hot
on the heels of and was
caused by the Noahic Flood, not 2 mya but about 4,500 years ago. Ireland
today is the same distance from the north pole as Warsaw, Moscow and Newfoundland
but has very different climate due to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. If this
ever slowed or stopped, northern Europe would become much colder, a scenario that
inspired the makers of The Day
After Tomorrow movie.

30,000 years ago, mammoths are said to have roamed the Shores of Lough Neagh, near
Belfast. Emily Murray at Queens University, Belfast, is a zooarchaeologist and studies
fossils (such as mammoth teeth). She tells viewers that ‘the latest dating
techniques have estimated that they [woolly mammoth remains] are between 65 and
95 thousand years old.’ But such techniques rely on multiple assumptions
which are unproven and unproveable—see
little-known facts about radiometric dating and
Radioactive dating no problem for the Bible. Furthermore, the evidence
of woolly mammoths,
how they arrived in Ireland and why they went extinct, is
no riddle for those who accept Genesis as history.

25,000 years ago, the ice advanced and as glaciers moved across the country, many
animals perished. The ice cover over Ireland ‘rose 15 times higher than Winsor
House in Belfast, Ireland’s tallest building.’ There is no reason to
dispute the great depths of ice cover but the biblical framework at present provides
the only viable explanation for understand the Ice Age. It reached glacial maximum
(and thus the greatest depths of the ice sheets) several centuries after Noah’s
Flood, some 4,000 years ago. Read an interview with a creationist weather scientist
who takes this model here.

Killard Point shows visible scratch marks, scars from a glacier that once covered
the entire Ards Peninsula (Co. Down).12

Photo Wikipedia.com

A drowned drumlin (Ice Age relic) in Clew Bay

‘Nowhere in Northern Ireland escaped untouched.’ We would agree, excepting
only the time-scale. We would also accept much else that is presented in this second
programme as evidence of past ice action in NI: the few out-of-place boulders (erratics)
that can still be seen, at Scrabo Hill (Co. Down) for example; the many drumlins;13 the fact that Belfast’s
own leaning tower, the Albert Clock (similar to London’s clock tower that
houses ‘Big Ben’), nicknamed drunken Albert, is leaning due
to the muddy clay underneath it—a reminder that this whole area was once covered
in ice. The clay—called sleach—can be up to 40 feet thick in places.
Thus, huge piles must be drilled down to support Belfast’s big buildings.

At Lough Melvin, Co. Fermanagh, fish called Arctic Char (smaller than their arctic
relatives) are found at a depth of about 150 ft and were described as ‘Ice
Age survivors’. Yes, but there is nothing particularly surprising about this
for the person whose worldview is based on a grammatico-historical reading of Genesis 1–11. Char breeding char over thousands of
years is simply another example of creatures breeding after their own kind, albeit
allowing for variation in size or form.

After the Ice Age, how did all the various animals and plants repopulate Ireland?
This was no problem for birds and insects but what about the others? Near the end
of the Ice Age, while lots of water was still locked up in ice sheets, sea levels
were lower. Today, only 13 miles of water separates Tor Head, NI, from Scotland.
However, Blueprint informed viewers that a deep sea trough always would
have divided the two land masses and surmised that it was probably people who brought
some of the plants and animals back, among other possible explanations. Viewers
were further informed that there are fewer flowering plants and mammals and no snakes,
moles or weasels compared to the rest of Europe. But NI does have the Strawberry
tree and fifteen other trees and dozens of animals that are native to Ireland but
not to Britain, all part of ‘the unique animal blueprint.’ On these
points, the documentary is uncontroversial—these interesting facts relate
to what we can all observe in NI today so there is no argument here. But
that is quite unlike the rampant speculation (albeit in keeping with a long-ages/evolutionary
worldview) about vanished history that is passed off as scientific evidence elsewhere.

Anyone who has spent time travelling through Ireland will have come across peat
bogs—peat is often cut, dried and burnt as a fuel.

Photo Wikipedia.com

Industrial peat-harvesting from a bog in County Offaly, Ireland

But the makers of Blueprint were not so interested in their economic benefits:
‘This bog is an organic history book and, by looking closely, experts
like Emily Murray can expose the evidence of how our plants, animals and climate have evolved since the ice melted
[emphasis added].’ This is a tall claim. Layers of rock, peat and ice cores
are not history books—rather, people’s presuppositions about
the past (the beliefs they already hold about history before even examining
the evidence) govern the way in which they interpret the evidence. For
instance, Emily Murray was shown talking animatedly about a peat core as allegedly
revealing time zones: one allegedly marked the end of the last Ice Age; another
with grey clay, devoid of plants, was interpreted as from a cold period; a brown
section showing plant remains, she confidently asserted, ‘tells us it was
a much warmer period’—but it told her nothing at all (peat
cores don’t speak for themselves!), rather this is her interpretation. Referring
to another part of the core, we were told: ‘At this point, trees and forests
recolonised the island giving us the landscape we know today.’ We don’t
deny that such peat cores contain much potentially useful information but once the
dates are shoehorned into a scheme that disallows biblical history by insisting
on many tens of thousands of years of time, objectivity has been lost.

Near the end of this second instalment, Crawley makes this interesting comment:
‘And since a lack of oxygen has made this peat land a perfect preservative,
a bog is a kind of natural memory bank, sealing away moments from our past, as we
might do today in a time capsule. When opened, these wet bogs have given up everything
from preserved roadways, to blocks of butter, ancient trees and even whole human
bodies that are thousands of years old.’ But one very big difference between
a peat bog and a time capsule—and actually the most crucial—is that
only the time capsule reveals the recorded date of burial when opened years
later. When archaeologists discover a body that has been preserved in peat, it is
highly unlikely to have a label attached that records date of burial—the same
is true of fossils of course. The ‘blocks of butter’ refers to the old
Irish practice of filling a wooden box (a mether) with butter and lowering into
a peat bog to preserve it—occasionally, these were forgotten and only retrieved
centuries later, the butter having apparently been petrified. This is one more example
that fossils form very rapidly.

People

10,000 years ago is the date when NI was said to have been invaded by the first
humans. At that time, it was a wilderness ‘full of prehistoric animals.’
This is incorrect. There is no such thing as prehistory if we start with the premise—as
the Lord Jesus, the apostles and other New Testament writers did—that Adam,
the first man, was made at the beginning of Creation, the very foundation of the
world and of time. See 15 reasons to take Genesis as history. And contrary to ‘Christian
compromises’ like the Gap Theory and Progressive Creationism, there were certainly
no pre-Adamite people.

In 1973 at Mount Sandel Fort, Coleraine, archaeologist Peter Woodman discovered
evidence of what he and his team interpreted to be the earliest settlers
of NI.

Photo Wikipedia.com

This Accelerator Mass Spectrometer, though impressive, is not a ‘time machine’!
See article.

As the programme follows him back to the same spot, he says these intriguing words
to camera: ‘You know, the trouble with visiting sites like this is that it’s
a little bit like a pilgrimage. There’s a certain act of faith that something
actually happened here.’ This is an honest statement but it rather gives the
game away! Scientists who study origins and who try to piece together what may have
happened in the dim and distant past have to build a possible reconstruction, based
on the very limited evidence that has survived to the present. Peter Woodman tacitly
admitted that he is a man of faith, yet his faith in past events comes from a different
worldview than the one based on the scriptural record in Genesis. See
The wrong glasses and chapter 1 of Refuting Evolution, also available
here: Evolution & creation,
science & religion, facts & bias.

The evidence at Mount Sandel seemed to be of ancient fireplaces (said to be almost
10,000 years old); the burnt remains of what these ancestors had eaten were discernable
as the bones of wild boar, wild hazel and fish. A great deal was made at this point
of their confidence in this date which had been determined using the more sensitive
AMS method of radiocarbon dating (i.e. accelerator mass spectrometry) on ‘the
small burnt fragment of a hazelnut shell.’

There is a world of difference between being able to accurately measure the amount
of C-14 (radiocarbon) in a piece of hazelnut shell and being able to give it an
absolute age

Emily Murray is shown with the AMS instrument and says: ‘So, essentially,
this is an archaeologist’s time machine.’ No! Radioisotope methods do
not measure time but the amounts of various elements in the specimen. Next
she says: ‘We can measure the amount of radioactive carbon that’s still
in that hazel nut and then, taking that measurement, we can compare it with how
much radioactive carbon is in a modern hazelnut and then the difference will tell
us how long ago it was since that hazelnut died.’ ‘So cutting edge technology
can tell us that this shell is 9,700 years old … ’ There is a world
of difference between being able to accurately measure the amount of C-14 (radiocarbon)
in a piece of hazelnut shell and being able to give it an absolute age—see
How accurate is C-14 dating. Consider too the highly problematic evidence
(for people who have great faith in carbon dating) of
radiocarbon in wood entombed in Triassic sandstone and
radiocarbon in diamonds! At the very least, such facts demonstrate that
the confident pronouncements of Blueprint regarding using these methods
as virtual time machines are completely unjustified.

At 6,000 years ago, viewers were assured that human ancestors cleared great sections
of forest in NI, planted crops and let their animals graze. ‘The idea was
so simple, yet it was brilliant.’ The ability to thus store food is supposed
to have led to their artistic, cultural and spiritual development! People discovered
gold in the Sperrin mountains and iron in the bogs of Co. Antrim. Metal working,
allegedly, allowed some people to develop a higher social status. There is plenty
of speculation here. The problem, though, is that these ideas about what people
were doing millennia ago are taught as if they are entirely factual and based on
abundant evidence—which is far from the case. Evidence, as we have said already,
has to be interpreted—it has to be read in the light of theory, in this case,
the idea that people have evolved from primitive beginnings. According to evolutionists,
if you go back far enough into the past and people become less clever, less inventive
and less able to manage their environment—at least, that’s the insinuation.
Conversely, as we move forward in time, more primitive human beings developed the
aesthetic, cultural and spiritual abilities that we take for granted today—a
kind of chronological snobbery is exhibited here! However, the Bible indicates that
metal-working and craft were around from the earliest times (Genesis 4:21, 22)—from the beginning. For more thought-provoking
articles on this subject from a biblical perspective, see the
archaeology Q&A page.

Towards the end of this final programme, it is stated that genetics shows that the
first ancestors of NI were from Britain, yet people’s DNA also shows commonalities
with that of people from France and even the Basques—in other words, not just
with the Celtic peoples of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (S.W. England). While interesting,
this is not particularly surprising because the Bible indicates that all people
across the world—those alive today and those who have ever lived in history—are
descended from ‘one blood’ (Acts 17:26), the first man Adam (1 Cor. 15:45) and his wife Eve, the ‘mother of
all living’ (Genesis 3:20). See, for example,
Who was Cain’s wife? and
Blood brothers.

References and Notes

BBC Northern Ireland screened the TV programmes on 31st
March, 7th April and 14th April 2008 and there were also radio
shows and a dedicated featured website,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blueprint/ [Ed. note: This link is no longer available]. The website is replete with numerous media
clips from the TV documentaries. Return to text.

Among others, this included the Director and two principle
geologists from the Geological Survey of N. Ireland, a Professor of Archaeology
from the University of Cork, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University
Belfast and a noted historian. Return to text.

See
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blueprint/ [Ed. note: This link is no longer available], last accessed 14 June 2008.
Return to text.

In NI, county names are often conveniently abbreviated to
Co. Return to text.

These are referred to by geologists as Old Red Sandstone rocks.
Return to text.

These are cave formations including such objects as stalactites
and stalagmites. Return to text.

Williams, E.L., Origin of bedded salt deposits (Nutting),
Creation Research Society Quarterly 26(1):15–16,
June 1989. Nutting (1984, Ref. 2) discusses the uniformitarian hypotheses of the
origin of vast salt deposits (evaporites) in the crust of the earth. Basically all
of the proposed models involve the evaporation of water (p. 4), which requires long
periods of time—which is usually preferred by naturalists. These models are
discussed within the framework of the actual chemical, geological and physical evidence
gathered at evaporite sites. Nutting proposes that all uniformitarian schemes fall
far short in explaining the origin of the deposits. He offers a catastrophic model
involving heated water which developed due to volcanic or igneous intrusive activity
(pp. 52–70) to explain the deposits. Return to text.

This is the mouse-sized Sinodelphys szalayi, the
alleged ancestor of opossums and kangaroos; from the Yixian formation, China. See
Luo, Z.-X. et al, Science 302:1934, 2003. This
fossil creature was said to be 50 million years older than the previous record holder!
Return to text.

It is true that such rock striations may indicate the past
movement of glaciers or ice-sheets, and that these particular scratches are likely
to have been caused by ice. However, many other earth processes are now known to
mimic this (such as submarine debris flows) so this feature alone is not diagnostic
of glaciations—see
here. There was only one Ice Age and that was post-Flood (See Oard, M.J.
Ancient Ice Ages or Gigantic Submarine Landslides, Creation Research Society
Monograph 6, Chino Valley, Arizona, pp. 57–67, 1997.) Return
to text.

Wikipedia states: ‘A drumlin (Irish droimnín,
a little hill ridge) is an elongated whale-shaped hill formed by glacial action.
Its long axis is parallel with the movement of the ice, with the blunter end facing
into the glacial movement. Drumlins may be more than 45 m (150 ft) high and more
than 0.8 km (½ mile) long’ Return to text.

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